review: the haunting of velkwood
ARC REVIEW: I received this ebook for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Title: The Haunting of Velkwood
Series: N/A
Author: Gwendolyn Kiste
Genres: Horror, Paranormal
Publishing Date: 5 March 2024
CW: Child abuse, Death, Homophobia, Pedophilia, Sexual assault, Sexual violence
My Rating: 3 / 5
Read if you’re looking for:
A strange event that caused a neighborhood to disappear many years ago, à la X-Files
A beautifully written eerie & unsettling atmosphere
A slow-paced meditation on trauma and loss
Lots of ghosts & bugs
Our main character, Talitha, has been floating through life in a dead end job since her neighborhood back home blinked out of existence. A paranormal investigator approaches Talitha to help his team, as it seems only previous residents are able to enter the shimmering boundary of the ghostly neighborhood. With no other prospects and guilt about leaving her little sister behind in the neighborhood, Talitha accepts, and eventually convinces two other survivors, and old friends, to join her. As Talitha makes several journeys back into Velkwood Street, she begins to put together the pieces of how she might be able to save her sister, all the while trying to keep the true events of the night of the schism hidden from the researchers.
This book really caught my attention with the summary, the idea is really intriguing. And I was really hoping some super weird stuff going on in the old neighborhood. However, although this is categorized as a horror novel, it’s more paranormal, and Talitha has a lot of interactions with the ghosts of the neighborhood. This story is also more metaphorical, dealing with the “ghosts of the past” and revealing old traumatic events in order to process them and move on.
Kiste does an amazing job making the reader feel the creepy and mysterious atmosphere, and I loved the descriptions of the neighborhood. I also really enjoyed the romantic relationship that is built over the course of the story. However, the substance wasn’t quite there for me. There is a lot of repetition, of ideas and plot points. I think that this might have worked better as a novella, so that the pacing worked a little bit more. The dialogue and setting was well written, but the characters felt a touch flat to me. I would have liked to see a little bit of a deeper dive into the main characters. Overall, this was a well written ghost story, with amazing creepy atmosphere, but don’t go into it expecting a ton of action, as it is more of a meditation on trauma.